So perhaps the great leap wasn’t in using red wine. Instead it was in replacing the known hot water/ethanol step with other hot ethanol mixtures already handy in the lab. I’m betting Saki.

]]>By: william beatyhttp://boingboing.net/2012/03/29/151955.html#comment-1383268
Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:13:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=151955#comment-1383268Wine bottle super power: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePjkCySBCs
]]>By: william beatyhttp://boingboing.net/2012/03/29/151955.html#comment-1383266
Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:09:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=151955#comment-1383266The true story must be interesting. Another accident like Penicillin? Goodyear spilling a latex mixture on his woodstove. The true genius then is in testing your department-party-contaminated samples, rather than throwing them out as any normal person would.

Also, conductivity isn’t hard to grasp once the usual misconceptions are cleaned up. “Conductor” is correctly defined as “medium which contains mobile charges.” Any electrically charged object is a conductor, as long as it’s free to move around. A pile of charged styrofoam peanuts is a conductor, since an applied voltage will make the peanuts leap through the air (and, motion of charged styrofoam is called electric current.) The quantum weirdness only appears when we start talking about *metal* conduction, as opposed to non-electron conductors such as salt water, charged raindrops, etc.

Maybe they were inspired by what I vaguely recall of the famous “tomato sandwich incident” where someone who grew frustrated that a chemical reaction only worked some of the time threw a tomato sandwich into it and found that that caused it to work every time.

]]>By: autarkhttp://boingboing.net/2012/03/29/151955.html#comment-1382691
Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:06:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=151955#comment-1382691 To be fair, I didn’t read very far into this (as in, the title and part of the first paragraph)… but I understand this to mean I will be some kind of super hero by drinking copious amounts of red wine.